The Japanese had their haikus.

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets.

We... have PowerPoint presentations.

PowerPoint has its detractors, but blaming it for bad presentations is like blaming fountain pens for bad poetry.

The real problem with PowerPoint and its open source equivalents...

...is that they aren't web-friendly.

If you export a slideshow as a web page...

...what you get is a bunch of images.

There aren't actually any words in these images.

There are just pixels that happen to be arranged in patterns...

...that our eyes and brain can translate into letters.

Search engines can't read this text. Neither can accessibility aids for the visually impaired.

And those things that look like hyperlinks? They're not---they're just more pixels.

One solution is to use HTML5 presentation frameworks to create real web-native content.

But these are even worse than PowerPoint when it comes to making everything a bunch of bullet points.

HTML5 doesn't let you draw on top of your text the way you would on a whiteboard or in PowerPoint.

(Well, technically speaking, you can if you superimpose a canvas element and position things correctly, but that's very fragile, doesn't improve accessibility, and is still opaque to search engines, so we don't regard it as a solution.)

What you're viewing now is a demo of our attempt to change all that. Our Slide-Drive project aims to create a complete web-native presentation tool.

To do this, we're taking advantage of Popcorn, which provides a Javascript event framework for HTML5 media, and Butter, an authoring tool built on top of Popcorn.

We're also using LibreOffice Impress as a front end. It provides all the slideshow creation tools we need...

...and knows how to convert presentations in other formats, particularly PowerPoint.

Here's how it all works.

Step 1: create or import a presentation using LibreOffice.

Step 2: using the export tools that Marco Cecchetti has been building, save the presentation as SVG.
This creates a single document with one SVG diagram per slide, along with metadata about the desired transition effects.

Step 3: drag and drop the slideshow onto Butter to import it.

Step 4: edit the slideshow in Butter. For example, if you want to synchronize with a voiceover, you can import the MP3...

...then stretch and shrink the slides to line up with time marks.

Why is this a better solution?

Because everything on your screen is native web content.

Pause this slideshow for a second and click on this link.

Hey, you didn't pause! If you had followed that link we would have shown you an ordinary web page containing another link that would re-open and resume this presentation. That's okay. We'll just continue as though you did follow our instructions.

That's right: you can hyperlink into a presentation, just like you can hyperlink into a particular section of a web page.

And when you copy and paste, you get the text you expect, rather than a section of an image.

Now, nothing's perfect. We still have issues with: